‘This is basically the Olympics of taxidermy’

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — It’s minutes before the entry deadline at the most prestigious taxidermy competition in the United States, and animals fill a sprawling expo hall like a frozen stampede.

In one corner, a competitor fluffs a bobcat with a blow dryer, and a man uses a toothbrush to smooth a buck’s fur. In another, a taxidermist wearing magnifying eyeglasses rearranges individual turkey feathers with tweezers while another paints a little eye shadow above a deer’s eye.

“It gives that lifelike look,” he said.

This is the 2019 World Taxidermy & Fish Carving Championships, which gathered some 1,000 experts in the art of bringing the dead back to life at the Springfield Expo Center this month. At stake? Some of the most important honors a serious taxidermist can claim.

“This is basically the Olympics of taxidermy,” said competitor Ashley Barrett, of Chambersburg, Pa., who has won two Best in the World titles, the equivalent of a taxidermy gold medal.

And the competition is stiff – in more ways than one. Cougars appear to dive off their stands. A giant tiger looks ready to pounce. Wolves fight. Turkeys strut. Wild goats race down a hill.

“I’m a little intimidated, to be honest,” said first-time competitor Keith Kinzel of Red Bud, Ill., about 30 miles southeast of St. Louis. Kinzel groomed a pouncing coyote with a dog brush and his wife’s blow dryer just before rolling it into the competition hall.

He spent 113 hours on the piece, including three hours adjusting the whiskers. He took another whole night making sure the ears were at the anatomically correct 45-degree angle for the pose.

“There are so many skills you need to learn to be decent at taxidermy,” said Kinzel, who runs a taxidermy business that caters to southern Illinois hunters. “You’ve got to paint. You need to know the habitat. You’ve got to learn how to sew. You need to know anatomy, art, zoology. You need to know it all.”

The championships put every one of those skills to the test.

The structure of the competition is a bit like the Westminster dog show, except that these animals happen to be dead.

Subcategories divide some 550 entries into groups as specific as “Whitetail Deer Heads: Long/thick hair, open mouth” and “Turkeys, strutting,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

There are categories for animal rugs, fish, waterfowl and “interpretive taxidermy,” featuring the more experimental work. Past winners include a dinosaur. This year there were two long-extinct prehistoric birds, a jolly beaver morphing into a wood log and a cougar blending into a rock in the shape of Texas.

When the entries are all in and every hair settled in place, judges get to work prodding noses and running their fingers through the fur that competitors just obsessively combed.

Wendy Christensen, one of two women tasked with judging the small mammals, stands about an inch away from a beaver with a wide-open mouth.

“Now what is your story? Why are you yelling at me?” she asks the beaver. “I like there to be a clear emotion.”

Christensen worked doing taxidermy for 35 years at the Milwaukee Public Museum and has a handful of world titles herself. She began learning the craft when she was 12 through a correspondence course.

After an initial look, Christensen pulls out a laptop and looks at reference pictures for each animal. Christensen looks for total anatomical accuracy, a high level of difficulty and creative flair.

The biggest point-scorers pull off the equivalent of a quadruple axel in the taxidermy world: taxidermy that requires metal work to keep the animals in gravity-defying poses. Open mouths are another major feat, requiring taxidermists to use supplies typically used in dental offices to make molds of the animals’ mouths. They then need to find the right paint to make it look like the animal might blink and walk away at any time.

The finished results aim to wow and rack up points. A raccoon appears almost electrocuted in midair as another raccoon bites its tail. A bear has a slight grimace as it climbs onto a prickly pear cactus. A coyote licks its lips, suspended above a partly devoured deer head with all the insides showing.

Heather Miller, who runs a taxidermy business in Halifax, Pa., attempted to get extra points with the baby skunk she brought sitting in a curled position on top of a yellow flower.

“I named him Lil’ Waylon,” she said. “I wanted to show difficulty by showing all the paws because those are super hard, so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll have him just chillin’ on a flower.”’

Though she tried shampooing the fur many times, she couldn’t quite eliminate the skunk smell.

“Lil’ Waylon is a little stinky, so that may take some points off,” she said. “But I like him anyway.”

Methods of mounting a deer were like a secret recipe in the taxidermy business. But in 1983 the World Taxidermy Championships was launched by the trade publication Breakthrough, “the magazine devoted to the serious wildlife artist,” and promised to share tips of the trade.

Attendees this year could go to seminars such as “Mounting a Strutting Turkey Part 1” and “3D Technology and Taxidermy.” “Custom Mammals” offered advice from Ken Walker, the subject of a documentary about his attempt to create a taxidermy Sasquatch, which premiered at the event.

Next to the competition hall, a trade show peddled everything a taxidermist could need. White animal forms that serve as a base hung on booth walls next to companies advertising tannery services and fake vegetation. In between was the Beetleshack, a business that uses the insects to clean and whiten bones, and Skulls Unlimited, which sells, well, skulls. Trophy haulers can help taxidermists get an animal back to the U.S. from Africa, while Payer Eyes advertises “glass eyes to die for.”

But most competitors rely on more than traditional taxidermy supplies in their work. Every taxidermist is a “MacGyver,” said Derek Plaisance, of Hammond, La.

Taxidermy tool boxes at the competition included butter knives, grapefruit scrapers, dog shampoos, sheen used to shine up horse coats, and bleach from beauty stores that is perfect for cleaning skulls.

“I go into Sally’s (Beauty Supply) and they know me by name,” said Plaisance, a tattooed man with gauge earrings who specializes in lizard taxidermy. “I’m a regular.”

Taxidermists also have to get creative about where they get the animal skins. Though most deer, ducks or bass are hunting and fishing trophies, more unusual animals can be harder to come by.

Clint Rickey, a world title winner from Dodgeville, Wis., brought a bison sent to him from a meat factory by a buddy.

Alicia Goode, a taxidermist at the Oakland Museum in California, showed up with a tiny owl she recovered after it died at an animal hospital.